Travel Carry for Germany

I’ve been working in Leipzig since Monday, a city I have never visited before. As with any business trip, I meticulously planned my stationery everyday carry. I’m attending a summit consisting of several talks, panel sessions and technical visits, so my stationery carry is geared towards easy notetaking and brainstorming.

Paper

Coming with me everywhere is a Field Notes pocket notebook at the moment. As I have mentioned earlier, I’m on a quest to use every edition to make a piece of display art for my future study. At the moment I’m using a Drink Local: Ales editionand I really enjoy it, although I feel like the cover will be mightily scuffed by the time I’m done with it. I’ve also got my one and only Field Notes Two Rivers notebook, a single I received in a trade.

My two Field Notes coming to Germany

My Two Rivers has a kind of Orwellian Animal Farm thing going on but in shades of pink and blue. I’ll be using these for jotting on the go and a bit of travel journaling.

My Two Rivers notebook in its entirety. Do you see what I mean about the George Orwell Animal Farm vibe?

These are wrapped up in my trusty green fauxdori, which recently got adorned with a CWPE 2017 patch. The plan is that I will take good enough care of this to add many more years’ worth of CWPE patches!

My main paper source for this trip however is my Baron Fig Confidant in Charcoal. I chose the Confidant as my work notebook to replace my previous Moleskine notebook. I wanted a sturdy notebook with good quality paper, something with a lot of pages to keep me going for a while. I thought about a Leuchtturm notebook, but I thought back to the paper inside the Baron Fig Explorer pocket notebooks and decided to go for the Confidant. Annoyingly, the very next week after I ordered it, Baron Fig released the plus sized version of the Confidant which would actually be my dream work notebook. Next time!

I love the yellow bookmark in the Confidant. It really pops alongside the charcoal colour. It’s a great flagship colour scheme for these notebooks.

I am really enjoying the Confidant. The paper is lovely to use with pencils and gel pens, and it stands up well enough to my occasional work fountain pen use. Baron Fig’s ethos is around creating “tools for thinkers” and the Confidant is described as “the book for ideas”. Perhaps it is just the effect of this marketing on me but there is something about this notebook that I feel makes my scribbles look good somehow. I’m expecting to fill it up with a lot of soundbites, discussion topics, brainstorms and lists of things to follow up on during my week.

I got excited last week about my trip to Leipzig and it clearly took over my thoughts.Some of my recent notes in my Baron Fig Confidant.

Writing tools

I’ve gone fairly minimalist on the writing tool front and focused on tools that are good for writing on the go. I’m bringing one of my favourite pencils, the CW Pencil Enterprise x Caran d’Ache Black Wood. I love this pencil. I’ve already sharpened my way through one of them completely and I’m now doing pretty well in getting through my second one. I’m also bringing the Tombow Mono 100 in an F grade. Caroline Weaver singled out this pencil in a recent episode of The Pen Addict as one of her favourites because of its point retention and having started using it, I am favourably impressed. I’ve got my trusty KUM Masterpiece sharpener to keep these two beauties ready for using.

Two gel pens are coming too: a Uni-ball Signo UM-151 .38mm gel pen in Brown Black, and a Pilot Juice .38mm in Turquoise Green. The Uni-ball Signo UM-151 in a .38mm line width can do no wrong in my opinion. I like writing with brown gel pens generally, I enjoy the sort of vintage effect they produce, and it’s good to use a different dark colour to black or blue black. I picked up a good few Pilot Juice .38mm gel pens in Japan as they’re difficult to come by in the UK. I love all things teal, sea green, blue green, etc, so this Turquoise Green pen really caught my eye.

I love the look of this Pilot Juice .38mm in Turquoise Green.

A trusty Zebra Mildliner in a bright shade of orange will help me keep important points in mind for when I come home and need to sift through all of the information I’ve jotted down. Lastly my Kaweco Classic Sport F nib is coming along: a great pen for travel, a great pairing with Baron Fig’s paper and the most enjoyable fountain pen out of the four I currently have in rotation for notetaking, as it is light and very comfortable to hold in the hand. And it’s German, so I’m bringing it back to its home.

Accessories

I’m taking my writing tools in a new pencilcase that I bought in Japan by a brand called United Bees. It’s geared towards a minimalist carry, which I love. I’m always looking for a reason to cut down on the size of my everyday carry and a small pencilcase prevents me bringing tools that are surplus to requirement. It’s bright and made of sturdy cotton canvas that will stand up to my bag.

Made for a minimalist carry.

Oh and I’m bringing a narrow washi tape. I’m all for a practical travel carry but there’s always space for a washi tape.

In summary

The tools in this travel carry are all ones that I know and love; I haven’t thrown in any real newbies for me to test out – they’re all reliables that I know I like to use. My next business trip is for a couple of weeks so I’ll probably bring some tools on that trip that I’m less familiar with. I also note that there are a couple of stationery stores in Leipzig on Tessa’s Stationery Map so if I get a free hour I will try and have a peek at those.